I’ve mentioned before that my first computer was an Epson Equity I+. I got it in 1987 and, unfortunately, got rid of it in the early 2000s. That decision has haunted me ever since.
Well, until recently, when I acquired one and started restoring it.
The restoration has brought back a flood of memories. I can feel the understanding growing every day, like a ten-year-old learning his first computer. Everything is new and fascinating. There’s a race to learn, to explore, to figure it all out.
As I dig into it, I’m constantly amazed. I can almost see the problems through the engineers’ eyes as they designed the hardware and software. There’s simplicity inside the complexity. When something doesn’t work, there aren’t ten layers of abstraction hiding the answer.
You can reason about it end to end.
That experience has been oddly grounding.
Modern systems are incredible, but they’re also opaque. We stack frameworks on platforms on services until even experienced builders rely more on trust than understanding. When something breaks, we hunt symptoms instead of causes.
Restoring this machine reminds me what it feels like to know a system again.
To see how choices connect.
To feel confident not because something is new, but because it’s clear.
That mindset has been showing up in how I think about CoffeeBreak.
AI tools are powerful. The progress is real.
But power without understanding doesn’t eliminate work. It just moves it around. Often onto people, quietly.
Unlike this restoration, with CoffeeBreak I’m not trying to build something nostalgic.
I’m trying to build something coherent.
There’s a quiet confidence that comes from knowing how a system works all the way through.
That’s the feeling I’m chasing, whether I’m restoring an old computer or building something new.
☕
Jake Dubin 